Saturday, June 7, 2014

5 Advanced Landing Page Techniques That Make Great Pages Even Better

Once you’ve created a standard, functioning landing page for the first time, there are still several tweaks you can make to fully optimize your page for conversions and lead nurturing. For marketers looking to graduate to the next level of landing page optimization, make sure you try using these 5 advanced optimization techniques:

1.) Privacy Policies and Trust Seals

As people become more adept at using the Internet, they’ve also become more cautious. With so many different scams and hackers out there, Internet users need to be more careful with the personal information they share online. That being said, if prospects don’t trust you with having their name and contact information, you’ll have a very difficult time generating any leads.

In order to help bolster your credibility and prove that you can be trusted, make sure you include your privacy policy and any applicable trust seals on all of your landing pages. By proving to prospects that you won’t use their personal information in inappropriate ways, your upfront approach will create a sense of trust, and in turn, increase your conversions!

2.) Testimonials

Just like your privacy policy and trust seals can help convince prospects that you’re a credible source, so can testimonials. I’m not talking about your typical, no-value-added testimonials though. You know the ones:

“What a great product!” – Steve R.

“A+ service!” – Bill W.

“Amazing!” – Mary P.

No, no, no. These testimonials should have substance. No one cares about what Bill W. and Mary P. have to say! They want to see something like this:

“Switching to Acme Corp. took a lot of stress off our business. Not only did they take time to truly tailor a plan that fit our team, but our expenses also dropped by over 28%!” – David Smith, CEO of Smith Services

Rather than using a corny statement about how great your business is, use testimonials that tell a story of how you addressed an actual problem for an actual customer. This makes it more believable, and more believers means more conversions.

3.) Lead Scoring

Once you have an abundance of leads coming into your inbound marketing funnel, now it’s time to start weeding out the sales qualified leads (SQL) from the marketing qualified leads (MQL), and especially the unqualified leads! By using lead scoring, you’re able to determine the sales-readiness of your leads by assigning point values to specific responses to the questions on your form. For example, for companies targeting high-level executives and decision makers, leads that enter a “.edu” email address can be assigned a negative value. This way, your sales team won’t waste their time selling to college students.

That being said, lead scoring can be a challenging process. Because it forces you to judge a book by its cover, businesses have to be very careful with the different ways they score each field. Before you assign any points to anything, it’s crucial that you sit down with your sales team to discuss your ideal customers and personas.

What job positions are you targeting?

Are you going after large or small businesses?

What industry do they work in?

When do they need help?

How far away are they?

Since every business and their audience is unique, there won’t be any one-size-fits-all ways to assign points. However, all of these questions (and more) must be answered before you can start properly scoring your leads.

4.) Psychological Visual Cues

Adding images to your landing page is a great way to help break up text and create a more visually balanced page. However, as any good content marketer knows, not all images are created equal. In order to maximize your images’ effectiveness, be sure you’re using these visual cues:

People – As humans, it’s simply in our nature to focus on other humans. When we see other people in advertisements (particularly babies and those we deem attractive), our eyes are immediately drawn to them. Take a look at the eye tracking heatmap below, for example. Rather than reading the landing page’s headline, the baby’s face is the first thing readers look at!

Directional Cues – Though your readers might be drawn to a certain image or headline, sometimes they need a little extra push towards where they should go next. Time to cue the cues! Looking at the example below, note how this page uses an arrow to draw readers from the details of the offer down to the calls-to-action.

Rather than only using explicit directional cues like arrows, however, marketers can also use implicit directional cues. Looking at an alternate version of the baby advertisement from before, notice what happens when the baby’s line of sight changes!

5.) Colors, Shapes, and Sizes

While we’re on the subject of visual preferences, let’s talk a little bit about colors, shapes, and sizes. In order to help draw attention to certain areas on your landing page, marketers can use different colors and shapes that stand out to prospects. As a matter of fact, take a look at how each color is typically used online:

And while different colors might elicit different feelings from your visitors, adding color is most effective when it’s used in contrast with another. For example, take a look at the LegalZoom landing page below. Notice how the orange CTA grabs your attention when combined with the contrasting blue text? Another great place to create contrast is with your form background itself. Just look how much this yellow background stands out against a white webpage!

Apart from using different colors, marketers should also be wary of the shapes they use. In most cases, buttons with rounded corners earn more conversions than those with sharp corners. This is largely due to the fact that rounded corners are easier for the eyes and brain to process, but also because humans have also been conditioned to avoid “threatening” sharp edges! However, when it comes to the size of your buttons, bigger is often better.